Vacuum Drying
Application ID: 42561
Vacuum drying is a chemical process frequently used in the pharmaceutical and food industries to remove water or an organic solvent from a wet powder. When designing a vacuum drying system, engineers aim to minimize the drying time while maintaining high quality in the product. This model investigates vacuum drying in a Nutsche filter-dryer, which consists of a cylindrical drum filled with wet cake. The top of the cake is exposed to a low pressure head space, and the side and bottom walls are exposed to heating fluid. By operating at a very low pressure and an elevated temperature, the evaporation rate of the liquid increases, thus accelerating the drying process of the powder. By modeling the heat transfer and evaporation of the solvent in the powder, the temperature and liquid phase profiles can be studied. This example is based on the paper published by Murru et al. for a powder dried with n-propanol under static conditions.
This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products:
however, additional products may be required to completely define and model it. Furthermore, this example may also be defined and modeled using components from the following product combinations:
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